UK ISP Community Fibre Launches 5Gbps Home Broadband Plan UPDATE
New customers considering whether to join UK broadband ISP CommunityFibre (CF), which has rolled out their full fibre (FTTP) network across 1.35 million UK premises (mostly in Greater London), may like to know that the provider will today replace their top 3Gbps (symmetric) speed package with an even faster 5Gbps premium plan.
The new residential package could perhaps be seen as a response to the growing competition in the market, which has witnessed a gradual rise in the number of ISPs offering multi-gigabit capable services and c.2Gbps packages now being relatively common. The shift from 3Gbps to 5Gbps thus helps to keep CommunityFibre in the top tier of performance providers, albeit primarily more useful for marketing than anything else.
The premium package follows similar pricing to their old 3Gbps tier and costs £59 per month on a 24-month term, which includes free setup, a wireless router and a 60-day satisfaction guarantee (i.e. no exit fees if you leave within this period). As usual, the monthly price of this package is locked until March 2026 and after that it will go up by £2 each April, but at the end of your contract the price will also increase by £4 versus your last month.
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Community Fibre CEO, Graeme Oxby, said:
“We were originally planning to release London’s fastest fibre broadband on April 1st, but didn’t want Londoners to think our unbelievable speeds were an early April Fools! Truth is, Community Fibre provides unbeatable speeds at the best prices all year round, and there’s certainly no joking around when it comes to that!”
The classic problem with packages as fast as this is that most consumers would struggle to harness much of that top speed, usually due to WiFi/device limits and any limitations of the online servers you’re connecting to (Why Buying Gigabit Broadband Doesn’t Always Deliver). But if you’re happy to pay for it, why not. The rest of the internet will catch up, eventually.
Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that some ISPs, such as YouFibre (Netomnia) and B4RN, already have packages based on even faster 10Gbps lines (usually averaging more like 7-8Gbps). But those cost a fair bit more, although this isn’t so relevant due to the primary issue of differing network availability.
Speaking of network availability, in London specifically, some of the FTTP networks built to larger MDUs by Telcom (now known as Elevate) did in fact offer 10Gbps broadband speeds to wealthy homes (flats). But that’s not really comparable to the sort of scale coverage that CommunityFibre can provide.
UPDATE 11:23am
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Shortly after posting this we noticed (credits to YuGi) that CommunityFibre had updated their website again, this time to add a 2.5Gbps package too. But oddly, the package only shows for a few seconds as you scroll and then vanishes, so I took a screenshot just to confirm that I hadn’t gone dotty. However, it seems to show up fine if you click the ‘Standard’ or ‘Premium’ package tag further up, which is a little odd (it’s £35 on standard and £39 for premium with mesh WiFi).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Can you get static ipv4 from them or it is cgnat only isp?
Unless this has changed since last year, then they only do Static IPs on their business packages. Most of their residential packages are CGNAT, but I recall that their old 3Gbps tier was an exception to that rule. I’d assume that’s still true for 5Gbps. They also support IPv6, so CGNAT is less of an issue.
CGNAT is less of a issue nowadays with reverse proxy’s, etc.
It’s about time IPv6 finally took over so ISPs don’t have to bend to the limited amount of IPv4 addresses
It’s probably sensitive information but it would be interesting to see if actual network usage changes when ISPs add these service tiers. I suspect once you get beyond a gig the median usage of people on a 5Gbps tier vs. a 3Gbps one looks the same, there’s just the usual growth in usage over time that affects all subscribers. They’re not going to download game patches more frequently because their connection is quicker, they’re just going to spend less time on the wire doing it. Upside for the ISP is they get to re-contract people who want to upgrade, and it looks good to put on the marketing.
The median is just noticeably higher than the 1G plan, at about 12Mbps peak time 95th and around 9-ish for 1G.
Yeah the value in these packages is burst speed not overall quantity of data transfered. It’s diminishing returns of course. 100 GB takes over an hour at 200 Mbit/s about 14 minutes at 1 Gbit/s about 5 minutes at 2.5 Gbit/s and 2.5 minutes at 5 GBit/s (if you can get it from the remote). I have 2.5 Gbit/s and with Steam have found that I can download data faster than my relatively high end CPU can decrypt it. So for gaming would be pointless to upgrade further. At these speeds a lot depends on what the remote can deliver as to whether it’s worth it.
Several people got told by Customer reps that Community Fibre will start charging for a public and dynamic IPv4 address (ie non-CGNAT). So it appears this is on the cards. Note they don’t seem interested in static IPv4 allocation, just public and dynamic IPv4s. Although in practive the IPv4 CF gives remains pretty much the same.
@Mark One thing you forgot to mention is that they finally now allow people to buy multi-gigabit plans without the premium wifi. Although the 5Gbps is still advertised only with Premium wifi.
I hope these isp’s going above 1Gbps are updating their routers in terms of both ethernet connections and WiFi speeds.
CF’s standard installation has a 2.5GbE port on the ONT and the supplied Linksys router has a 2.5GbE WAN port, but the other 3 ports are 1GbE. For the 3gbps and now 5gbps plan they update the ONT to a 10GbE SFP+ and a Technicolor router with a 10GbE WAN. Although I think they’re using a different router now.
I spoke to them a few months ago about my 1gb line, they said its NOT cgnat.
Not only is this cheaper than Netomnia / YouFibre, but if they do an alternative like dynamic IP that rarely changes, or offer static IPv4 or routable IPv6, then it puts Netomnia / You Fibre’s £5 per month for a static IP to shame (and some other Altnets).
In this example, £5 is actually quite a chunk on a broadband package price JUST for an IP address, most would be happy with Dynamic and not their fault Netomnia / YouFibre cannot offer and have CGNAT by default.
Irony is Netomnia’s CEO came from CF originally!
What does the CEO of Netomnia/YouFibre’s CV have to do with product pricing? Is he under an obligation to undercut a company he doesn’t compete with because he led them? Seems a weird way to run a business, ignoring your own business model and operational data to undercut a previous employer you don’t compete with but I’m not a CEO so please educate me.
I just got finished upgrading to 3Gbps. I spent a couple weeks tweaking my 2015 TS440 thinkserver with a 5Gbps NIC, nvme SSD & Sabnzbd/nzbget tweaks. Max that rig can maintain is 2.5gbps so I won’t be going for 5Gbps until I upgrade my server.
It’s bonkers we’re at the state that the internet is surpassing what our hardware can do at home. CF is only charging £39 monthly including the mesh for me. Bargain too.
It doesn’t seem that bonkers that 2025 tech had surpassed your 2015 server.
I’m running pfsense with YF’s 8/8gb.. works like a dream…
It’s bonkers what altnets are offering compared to Openreach ISPs..
Sad really how the market is at the moment.
They are far faster for a much better price, open reach is far slower across the country.
Exactly! CF is offering 5Gbps symmetrical for £59, while EE on Openreach is charging £70 for 1.6Gbps download and just 115Mbps upload. The market is all over the place—Ofcom really needs to step in and regulate pricing, especially with Openreach’s excessive charges.
Openreach have their prices controlled by Ofcom, they don’t allow them to compete on price due to their assumed monopoly so have pre set pricing. Realistically Virgin media are getting close to significant market control as well so in the future may be subject to the same laws as Openreach
Once Openreach finish off their GPON deployment, they’ll start upgrading their OLTs and associated equipment to support XGS-PON. Their focus at the moment is on the rollout. If I was on BT/OpenReach now, I’d be getting >8Mb/s on ADSL. I do have 3Gb CF though. If I had the option of 1Gb from BT/OR (Or more likely A&A), I’d happily take it, it’s still more than enough for my needs realistically. That there’s a lot of people out there who don’t have access to FTTP at all says that their focus is in the right spot.
I would like to know, can anyone confirm that pfsense can route 8 gig or above?
We need them here in Glasgow, i would jump ship from VM in an instant